Researchers at Harvard University have developed a method to grow corticospinal neurones – a class of brain cells that degenerate in motor neurone disease (MND) and are damaged in spinal cord injuries.
Corticospinal neurones are specialised nerve cells whose axons extend from the brain through the spinal cord to control voluntary skilled movement; damage to their long axons is a major contributor to loss of motor function in spinal injuries and the progressive degeneration seen in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), the most common form of MND.
The team used progenitor cells – stem like cells capable of differentiating into more specialised cell types – and identified conditions that reliably induce them to become corticospinal neurones in vitro.
Please see the NR Times for more details on this research.